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Towards a Unified Conception of Finite Reason: A Study of Practical Sensibility in Kant

Jessica Tizzard

University of Chicago

Dissertation Introduction

1.

Since its first reception in the 1780s, Kant’s project has been framed as one attempting a

great unification of two diverse schools of thought. The arrival of the critical works after a silent

decade of reflection bear the fruit of a sustained and systematic attempt to unite the rationalist

school he was trained in, with the empiricist school that stirred his mature thinking into

consciousness. The result is a philosophy that is as concerned to emphasize reason’s autonomy as

it is to recognize its dependence on the senses. But it is equally true that since its first reception,

Kant’s unified vision has struck many as fated to bottom out in a dualistic conflict, which expresses

itself most fundamentally through a rigid distinction between the incommensurable realms of the

intelligible and the sensible. Many have objected that to understand reason as both free and

sensibly dependent is to embrace an oxymoronic account of our mental life that divides rather

than unifies, reducing both knowledge1 and action to pale imitations of their common sense

counterparts. With this dualism, the possibility of knowing the world and acting from knowledge

of the good are both marred by our dependence on subjective sensible representations that reflect

                                                                                                                         1 I will typically follow standard translation practices, which render ‘Wissen’ as ‘knowledge,’ and ‘Erkenntnis’ as ‘cognition’. Kant gives both concepts technical senses with different scopes. Wissen is that variety of Erkenntnis which is grasped systematically, hence the German word for the concept of science, ‘Wissenschaft’ (JL 9:72). Thus while all Wissen is Erkenntnis, not all Erkenntnis is Wissen, as a result of which Kant uses ‘Wissen’ much less frequently. The fact that Kant reserves a special place for the term ‘Wissen’ does not, however, mean that he thinks our everyday Erkenntnis fails to amount to what English speakers would call knowledge.

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the nature of our particular constitution rather than the nature of objective reality, truth, or

goodness. Because this dependence cannot cannot help but influence the activity of reason,

human knowledge is thought to be somehow less than, beholden to the strict objective standards

set by reason and yet haplessly wedded to the unstable subjective contingencies constitutive of the

sensible realm. From this vantage point, it is easy to conclude that Kant’s rationalism is ill-suited

to human life.

In the last few decades, there have been numerous attempts to read Kant in a way that

cuts against this narrative, and recaptures the unifying vision he took himself to have articulated.

The best of these attempts recognize that it is the seemingly contradictory fact of reason’s self-

determining activity which accounts for the possibility of our dependence on the sensible.2 For it

is this activity which transforms sensibility and its deliverances so that they can serve as objects in

acts of cognition. So understood, our spontaneous rational and receptive sensible capacities do

not stand opposed, with the former conditioning the possibility of cognition and the latter

handicapping this possibility, rendering it subjective, as if filtered through rose-tinted glasses.

Instead Kant’s position is taken to show how the sensible element of cognition is at once a marker

of our finitude—a sign of our embodiment, our physical inhabitance—and yet not antithetical to

reason’s endeavor to systematically know ourselves and much else besides. On this view, sensibly

                                                                                                                         2 Robert Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); John McDowell, “The Logical Form of an Intuition,” Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 23-42; Stephen Engstrom, “Understanding and Sensibility,” Inquiry, vol. 49, no. 1 (Feb. 2006), pp. 2-25; Stephen Engstrom, The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical Imperative, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); James Conant, “Kant’s Critique of the Layer-Cake Conception of Human Mindedness,” unpublished; Thomas Land, “Kantian Conceptualism,” Rethinking Epistemology: Vol. 1, eds. Günter Abel and James Conant, Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 197-240; Robert Pippin, “Reason’s Form,” The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, Volume I: Philosophy and Natural Sciences, ed. Karl Ameriks, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 373-394; Thomas Land, “Nonconceptualist Readings of Kant and the Transcendental Deduction,” Kantian Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (Mar. 2015), pp. 25-51.

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dependent reason is not doomed to enjoy only a pseudo-cognition tainted by our subjectivity. To

be sure, we can and often do fail to know things, we are liable to be ignorant and to misjudge. As

I will argue at length in the chapters to come, our dependence on the senses is a condition on the

possibility of such failure. Had we a different kind of intellect, one which was not reliant on the

senses for cognition, miscarriages in judgment would be logically impossible. But when we do

judge well, we enjoy real cognition of objects that is not the worse for being sensibly dependent.

Insofar as such judgments are constituted through the activity of the higher cognitive capacities—

reason and understanding—they bear the essential features of cognition as such. The sensibly

dependent activity of reason and the understanding may be contingent in important ways that

mark our cognitive faculty as fallible, but contingently won cognition is still cognition in the full

sense of the term. In this respect, Kant’s views reflect our pre-theoretical understanding of what

it is to have knowledge. We need not occupy God’s perspective, take up the view from nowhere,

or have perfect intellects in order to know anything.

The present study is a partial defense of this view, which claims we can salvage Kant’s

unifying vision by rethinking the relationship that holds between our spontaneous cognitive and

receptive sensible capacities. Key to my defense is the claim that the autonomous activity of the

former determines the nature of the latter, transforming sensibility into a capacity that at once

conditions the possibility of knowing and failing to know. As Kant describes this relationship in

the Critique of Pure Reason, “sensibility, when subordinated to understanding, as the object upon

which the latter exercises its function, is the source of real modes of cognition. But the same

sensibility, in so far as it influences the operation of understanding, and determines it to make

judgments, is the ground of error” (B351). To develop this idea, I join those who emphasize that

we should understand these elements of our cognitive faculty to relate to one another as form to

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matter.3 The concept of form, of that which determines, applies to the spontaneous capacities,

principles, and concepts which make cognition possible by articulating the grounds for

combination that enable a systematically connected body of judgments. The concept of matter, of

that which is determinable, applies to the receptive sensible capacity and its deliverances, which

individuate these combinatory acts.4 Far from being that which alienates us from the possibility

of cognition, sensible matter is what enables discrete acts of cognition to occur. Without it, reason

and understanding would have nothing to determine, nothing upon which to exercise their

function.

Of course, Kant himself often emphasizes the importance of the concepts of form and

matter. In the Critique of Pure Reason, they are indispensable to his analysis of space and time as

forms of sensible intuition in the Transcendental Aesthetic; and in the Transcendental Analytic,

he declares that form and matter underlie all concepts of reflection on the nature of the

understanding, “so inseparably are they bound up with all [its] employment” (A266/B322). In the

practical writings, he distinguishes between the form and matter of practical principles of reason,

insisting that he is the first philosopher to recognize that moral worth must rest on their formal

rather than material features (KpV 5:39). Accordingly, it is common for Kant commentators of

all stripes to draw on these concepts to explain his system. What sets the current strand of thinking

apart is its commitment to a resolute hylomorphism which alone can safeguard the unified vision

that is my focus here. On this view, we cannot take the concept of sensible matter to refer to stand

                                                                                                                         3 Robert Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason; John McDowell, “The Logical Form of an Intuition”; Stephen Engstrom, “Understanding and Sensibility”; Stephen Engstrom, The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical Imperative; Robert Pippin, “Reason’s Form”; James Conant, “Kant’s Critique of the Layer-Cake Conception of Human Mindedness,” unpublished. 4 See A266/B322 in the Critique of Pure Reason for Kant’s formulation of form and matter as determination and determinable.

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alone representations that are intelligible to the subject independently of formal determinations

from the higher cognitive capacities. One of my central claims will thus be that there is no mere

matter, only representations that are more or less cognitively determinate, more or less informed

by spontaneity. Put another way, we do not first enjoy a feeling or sense an object without formal

determinations, and then apply the forms of understanding and reason in order to have cognition.

This is what makes the view resolute in its commitment to the concepts of form and matter, and

the unity they enable: any reference to matter is necessarily reference to the material part of a

capacity, act, representation, or object comprised of both a spontaneous formal and a receptive

material element. It is relatively uncontroversial to claim that Kant thinks all sensible matter is

determinable, but the hylomorphism that I argue for here goes further, insisting that there can be

no matter which is not already subject to a formal determination of some kind. As I will claim,

even sensibility’s own form as a capacity cannot be regarded independently of this determining

activity. Because it is to serve as matter to the forms of reason and the understanding, the entire

capacity must be understood as determined by the latter’s spontaneous activity. This resolute

hylomorphism thus claims that our sensibility, the sensibility of a rational being capable of

cognition, is always already transformed by the determining activity of the higher cognitive

capacities. It could not provide matter for either theoretical or practical cognition were this not

the case.

If we do not make this commitment, the Kantianism that results, however distinguished

or sophisticated, remains open to the objections with which I began. To salvage Kant’s unifying

vision, we cannot think of his philosophy as a selective aggregation of the truths in rationalism

and empiricism. This is exactly what we do if we take his emphasis on the role of experience to

entail a commitment to the consciousness of mere matter that bears no rational form, excluding

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the influence of reason from sensible nature in a move that cannot help but result in a divided and

untenable view. Instead, we must understand Kant to hold a sensibly dependent rationalism which

recognizes our reliance on the senses, but insists that sensible matter as such depends on the

formal elements constitutive of cognition for its intelligibility. The sensible world in which we live

is thus already a unified totality of objects that, insofar as they are objects for us, bear some trace

of the form of cognition, the form of intelligibility. To transcend this world, to exclude the senses

and contemplate the thing-in-itself, is therefore to abstract from this unity, not to cross a great

divide.

I know of no other work that states the above view in precisely these terms, but I take

myself to have expressed a position whose features, so broadly stated, would be shared by a small

number of Kant interpreters. Strikingly, however, these interpreters typically use issues in Kant’s

theoretical philosophy to articulate their commitments.5 My principal contribution to the

development of this strand of Kantianism will thus be to turn to the practical philosophy, and

show how it too can be read as exhibiting a resolute hylomorphism that enables Kant’s sensibly

dependent rationalism, his unifying vision, to extend to our practical life. The result is an account

of practical reason which takes its structure to closely parallel that of theoretical reason, so that

each of reason’s two uses can be taken to represent a more determinate version of the same

structure, that of sensibly dependent reason itself.

                                                                                                                         5 The two exceptions I know of, which are a great source of inspiration for the present work, are Robert Pippin, “Reason’s Form,” The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, Volume I: Philosophy and Natural Sciences, ed. Karl Ameriks, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 373-394; and Stephen Engstrom, The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical Imperative, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Neither of these works give a sustained treatment of how sensibility relates to reason, which is my focus here.

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This treatment of the practical philosophy is certainly called for, and not just for the sake

of completeness. For Kant has often been accused of arguing an indefensible moral psychology

rooted in his rigoristic rationalist commitment.6 On the view commonly attributed to him, human

nature conditions needs and desires that, while in principle determinable by the form of practical

reason, resist such determination as a matter of course. So when Kant says that our moral life is

fixed around a system of imperatives, he implies that the moral order which springs from the

nature of reason itself must be forced upon our unruly sensible nature. Here again, we have not a

unified picture of human mindedness, but form being imposed upon an independently intelligible

sensible matter. Only in this case, the picture is more determinate in that it is distinctly practical

in nature: the form is that of practical reason’s a priori moral law, and the matter is that of sensible

desire, desire which has been determined independently of reason, through basic facts about our

physical, biological, and psychological nature.

Even those who are sympathetic with Kant’s position have articulated his view in these

terms. One of the world’s most prominent English-speaking interpreters of Kant, Paul Guyer,

insists that Kant has “a profoundly dualistic conception of human nature.”7 From the fact that

Kant identifies reason and sensibility as two distinct capacities with different laws and

characteristics, Guyer concludes that,

“Kant conceives of us as creatures who must and can act in accordance with the laws valid for all rational creatures, but he never conceives of us as creatures who

                                                                                                                         6 The first contemporary reading which argues that Kant has an overly simplistic, divided moral psychology is widely attributed to T.H. Green, whose view became known through Terence Irwin’s, “Morality and Personality: Kant and Green,” Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Allen Wood, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). For a helpful survey and refutation of this criticism, see Andrews Reath, “Hedonism, Heteronomy, and Kant’s Principle of Happiness,” Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 33-66. For a more widely known objection along the same lines, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 15. 7 Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 365.

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can act in accordance with these laws by means of our reason alone, without also recognizing our sensibility and inducing this sensibility to act in accordance with the demands of reason by means appropriate to sensibility.”8

Of course Guyer is right to say Kant thinks we need to look beyond reason to sensibility to give

a full philosophical account of human action. Nor should he deny that sensibility has certain

distinct characteristics and laws which make it possible for us to have inclinations that tempt us

to act contrary to the moral law. His misstep is to conclude from this that the only workable

conception of moral sensibility involves treating it like a completely independent capacity that can

only be soothed on its own terms, as he says, “by means appropriate” to it. The language of

inducing or nurturing sensibility as a means to morality suggests that sensibility can only function

as an external factor, one that must be brought into line for the sake of an end determined

independently of the sensible capacity’s own interests. To be sure, we must sometimes take this

stance towards ourselves and our moral progress. Breaking bad habits or creating good ones can

involve treating desire as something to be trained through methods that focus on one’s particular

sensible constitution, employing inducements that make self-improvement bearable rather than

focusing on the rational standing of our end. Kant is also insistent that we should cultivate those

aspects of our sensible nature—feelings of beneficence, gratitude, and sympathy—that are

conducive to acting well (MS 6:452-9). But these aspects of his account do not necessarily fix the

general relationship between reason and sensibility as one of dualistic conflict. If practical

cognition and, more ambitiously, practical wisdom are to be at all possible for us, we must

understand the relationship between reason and sensibility in a completely different way. Instead

of a wholly independent capacity that must be brought into line through the foreign demands

imposed by reason, we must think of sensibility as an integrated part of the rational subject whose

                                                                                                                         8Guyer, ibid., p. 366.

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function is to provide matter for practical reason. If we give up on this unified vision, we give up

on the possibility of practical life as Kant himself understands it. My aim is thus to articulate a

reading of Kant’s practical philosophy that is completely free of Guyer’s dualist reading and the

impositionism9 it implies, and so in a unique position to represent Kant’s actual view.

The heart of my account is a version of the claim made above, namely, that fully

committing to Kant’s hylomorphism requires thinking of sensibility itself as transformed by the

higher cognitive capacities. As I will show, we must posit form/matter relations not just between

the various elements of a representation, but also between the capacities of mind that make these

possible. The latter are in fact primary: the relationships determined amongst the capacities

themselves dictate the nature of the particular activities and representations that are characteristic

to each of them. With reason’s practical use, sensibility takes on a distinctive form insofar as it is

determined by the moral law, the self-conscious form of pure practical reason.10 As we will see,

the sensible element germane to the practical use of reason is subjective sensation or feeling, which

serves as the material aspect of sensible desire. The portion of the Critique of Practical Reason

dedicated to sensibility must thus concern practical reason’s ability to determine and transform

our capacity for feeling. In Kant’s own words, it must be about “the relation of pure practical

reason to sensibility and about its necessary influence upon sensibility to be cognized a priori, that

is, about moral feeling” (KpV 5:90).11 The interpretive position I develop here claims that we need

to think of reason’s influence on our capacity for feeling as what secures the unity of Kant’s view.

                                                                                                                         9 I borrow this term from Robert Pippin, “Reason’s Form,” p. 376. 10 See KpV 5:29, where Kant rhetorically suggests that unconditional or moral law is “the self-consciousness of a pure practical reason.” 11 See also 4:460 in the Groundwork: “In order for a sensibly affected rational being to will that for which reason alone prescribes ‘the ought,’ it is admittedly required that his reason must have the capacity to induce a feeling of pleasure or of delight in the fulfillment of duty, and thus there is required a causality of reason to determine sensibility in conformity with its principles.”

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In short, we can cognize a priori that practical reason must have an effect on feeling because this

is the structure our mindedness must have if practical cognition, cognition of the good, is to be

possible for us. Relating as form to matter, as that which determines to that which is determinable,

practical reason conditions sensibility, giving it the character it must have as the sensibility of a

moral being whose capacity to feel is responsive to practical demands. In this way the receptive

capacity that is not inherently rational—and as such can be possessed by both rational and non-

rational animals alike—is transformed, so that its deliverances possess the form that makes them

suitable for serving in acts of practical cognition. We can understand this determining activity as

working on two levels. At the level of capacities, practical reason determines sensibility itself. But

it is equally true that through this activity, sensibility acquires a distinctly rational form that stands

as the determining element to its own matter. Thus both our general capacity for practically

oriented feeling, and the particular feelings themselves bear this rationally determined form.

Because this analysis is concerned with practical reason’s influence on feeling, the

experienced reader of Kant will not be surprised to find that the concept of respect functions as

its keystone. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant describes respect as the positive aspect of moral

feeling (KpV 5:75), the result of pure practical reason’s law influencing sensibility by ordering or

limiting it so that its deliverances can serve as the material element of practical cognition. Given

that respect plays this role, I claim that it should be thought of as the form of practical sensibility

in an argument that draws a close analogy to space and time as the forms of theoretical sensibility.

Though of course not all of our actions are motivated directly by respect for the moral law, our

sensibility is respectful in character because it is inherently sensitive to the demands of morality.

Even when we fall short, as we often do, our sensible capacity still bears the form of rational

determination that makes good action possible. Thus reason does not either impose or fail to

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impose its rigid form upon sensibility, resulting in good action that has sprung from reason, or

evil action that has sprung from our sensible needs. The way we think about action cannot be

fractured in this way. Insofar as Kant argues that our sensibility is necessarily determined a priori

by moral interest, that we have a natural predisposition towards the good (R 6:26), that we feel

pleasure or pain upon seeing how our actions meet or fail to meet the moral demands that do so

interest us (G 4:460; MS 6:399), he shows us that our capacity for feeling is already rational in

form, and indeed that it must be, for otherwise there would be no unified subject capable of

knowing the good.

2.

If the central claims of my reading can be upheld, the unified conception of sensibly

dependent reason that results allows us to rethink the role of sensibility and thus of motivation

within Kant’s practical philosophy. As we will see, Kant’s discussion of the relationship between

our higher and lower capacities is concerned to make sense of the moral Triebfeder, a concept

typically translated as ‘incentive’ but which more literally breaks down to ‘driving spring,’ capturing

what motivates the subject to action. Interpreters have held that Kant’s commitment to the

concept of a sensible incentive betrays his interest in moral sentimentalism, an empiricist strand

of moral theory that occupied him during his developmental years.12 How we think of moral

sensibility and motivation is thus directly connected to how we interpret the attempted unification

                                                                                                                         12 See, for example, Karl Ameriks, “Kant, Hume, and the Problem of Moral Motivation,” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 89-107; Paul Guyer, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 161-197; Owen Ware “Kant on Moral Sensibility and Moral Motivation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 52, no. 4 (Oct., 2014), pp. 727-746.

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of rationalist and empiricist thought that I attributed to Kant above. His own mature stance on

the respective gains of each school is well expressed in a letter to Marcus Herz written in 1773:

“the highest ground of morality must not simply be inferred from the pleasant; it must itself be pleasing in the highest degree. For it is no mere speculative idea; it must have the power to move. Therefore, though the highest ground of morality is intellectual, it must nevertheless have a direct relation to the incentives” (10:145, emphasis mine).

We can take two important points from Kant’s claims here. First, we must not underestimate

Kant’s radical conception of practical reason and the moral imperative. However intellectual the

claims of morality might be, their basis in reason does not relegate their status to static, merely

speculative claims about the nature of good and evil. The moral law must itself be capable of

moving us, independently of any other incentive to act. Second, the motive power of pure practical

reason’s law cannot be secured without establishing its relation to sensibility and some kind of

incentive. Our minds are possessed of both reason and sensibility, and our dependence on the

latter requires that we account for the sensible element of practical reason, regardless of the

ultimate source of motivation. If we are not careful here, the air of oxymoronic self-defeat can

take hold again, this time assuming the specifically practical guise. For Kant thinks we must both

grasp the complete autonomy of reason, casting off the sentimentalist view which places the

ultimate source of morality in feeling, and acknowledge that as embodied finite beings, we are

sensibly dependent and so cannot fully explain the possibility of moral motivation without an

appeal to the senses.

These two necessary and seemingly irreconcilable features of Kant’s view have proven to

be the departure point for a prominent debate about Kant’s theory of motivation. Contributions

are typically framed through an intellectualist vs. affectivist framework whose parameters are set by

the question of whether respect, the moral feeling produced by practical reason, should be

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understood as primarily affective or cognitive in nature.13 Some commentators argue that the

purpose of respect is best explained by concentrating on its nature as a feeling with affective force

and varying intensity.14 Others argue that Kant’s tendency to distinguish respect from merely

pathological feelings suggests that we need to understand it in cognitive terms, as indicative of the

subject’s ability to grasp the authority of the moral law, an act which is itself sufficient to bring

about action.15 The debate is thus split between those who emphasize the role of sensibility in

explaining the possibility of motivation, holding that we need something like the vivid push of

sensible desire to account for our interest and action; and those who hold that we must understand

respect as motivating because of the spontaneous cognitive activity that grounds it, and so as

fundamentally different from merely sensible desire. Though both of these positions seizes upon

fundamental aspects of Kant’s view, they are necessarily misleading insofar as each misinterprets

sensibility’s relation to practical reason in its own way. The affectivist embraces the dominant

dualistic reading commonly attributed to Kant, holding that the autonomy of pure practical reason

is compatible with a need to account for sensible motivation in terms fixed by an independently

intelligible view of empirical psychology. The intellectualist, wary of the seeming contradiction

this implies, pulls back from the economy of sensibly determined motivation that the affectivist

takes to be necessary to Kant’s picture. But in so doing, she obscures the fact that sensibility has

any real role to play, painting it as a capacity whose deliverances merely serve to get in the way of

what would otherwise be perfectly executed rational activity. In either case, we have a view that

                                                                                                                         13 For a helpful summary, see Owen Ware, “Kant on Moral Sensibility and Moral Motivation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 52, no. 4 (Oct., 2014), pp. 727-746. 14 I will draw on primarily on affectivist accounts offered by Richard McCarty, Paul Guyer, Jeanine Grenberg, Larry Ferrera, and Owen Ware. 15I will draw primarily on intellectualist accounts offered by Andrews Reath, Henry Allison, and Carla Bagnoli.

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fails to uphold Kant’s unified conception of sensibly dependent reason and do justice to both our

spontaneous and receptive capacities. Both views have taken up a dualistic conception of human

nature, and thus cannot emphasize the role of one capacity without obscuring the other. When

reason and sensibility are set against one another in an impositionist framework, explaining moral

motivation requires either descending to the level of empirical psychology or retreating into a

rationalism that neglects the role of feeling.

The view I argue for instead allows us to maintain both the autonomy of reason and the

importance of sensibility without a dualistic conception of human nature. It does so by raising the

so-called empiricist element of Kant’s view to the level of metaphysics. The central arguments

sketched above—that there can be no matter without rationally determined form, and that we

must therefore think of the capacity to feel as possessing its own such form—are founded in a

priori claims about the nature of cognition and what our minds must be like insofar as we are

capable of it. The account of sensibility that forms a crucial part of Kant’s practical philosophy is

thus not based in a naturalistic account involving appeals to our psychology, or empiricist tenets

which claim the vivid immediacy of the senses can be the only true source of motivation. It has

been replaced by a metaphysical account of discursive cognition, the kind of cognition enjoyed by

a finite being whose intellect is not capable of cognizing objects through the spontaneous activity

of reason alone. Allen Wood is particularly good at formulating this point, though as I will argue,

he too ultimately fails to grasp its full significance and the implications that it has for Kant’s view.

In his introduction to Kant’s Moral Religion, Wood cites Heidegger’s claim that “Kant was the first

to arrive at an ontological, non-sensuous concept of sensibility,”16 adding that “man’s sensibility

                                                                                                                         16 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, fifth edition, trans. Richard Taft, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 19; cited by Allen Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 3.

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is not for Kant the reason we call man a ‘being of needs.’ Rather, it is man’s finitude which gives

transcendental significance to the sensible factors in human volition.”17 Thus when we turn to the

issue of sensibility and motivation in Kant’s practical philosophy, we have not left behind the

terrain of metaphysics to descend to that of empirical psychology. We preserve Kant’s unified

vision only insofar as we recognize that his emphasis on sensible dependence does not counter

his rationalism, it proceeds from it, forming a necessary part of any critical investigation into the

nature and limits of our cognitive faculty.

Though others have sought to undercut the accusations of dualism leveled against Kant

and argue for a non-empirical account of moral motivation, only the hylomorphic conception of

reason and sensibility sketched above can secure this position. To successfully raise Kant’s

discussion of sensibility to the level of metaphysics, we need a transformative conception of

sensibility, one that grasps its necessary features in light of its role as the receptive part of a

cognitive faculty. Specifically, we must understand our capacity to feel to be rationally determined

and so essentially responsive to the demands of reason. This is what the concept of respect secures

for Kant’s position. As the marker of sensibility’s rational transformation, respect is both affective

and intellectual in character: that we feel it shows that our capacity to be affected is sensitive to

the claims of reason. If we cannot secure this view, motivation remains beyond reason’s influence,

a dualistic conception of human nature will prevail, and our best hope will be a moral psychology

that proceeds by either overpowering or placating independent sensible desires in the service of

moral ends. If, however, we take sensibility to be always already determined by reason, and thus

necessarily responsive to its claims, we can argue that motivation is as dependent upon the

objective standards of reason as it is upon subjective conditions of sensibility. Because the latter

                                                                                                                         17 Allen Wood, ibid., p. 4.

  16

has been rationally determined, to recognize the cognitive content, the rational standing of a

practical command is to be motivated by it.

Of course, we do not automatically do something simply insofar as we judge it to be good.

The necessary connection between objective cognitive content and subjective motivation that I

argue for cannot be construed in such simplistic terms. In fact, to propose this kind of intellectual

determinism would destroy Kant’s complex yet unified account of sensibly dependent reason. Our

practical reasoning is much subtler in character: judgments can be more or less determinate, more

or less efficacious, and we are always prone to the kind of rationalization and self-deceit which

weakens our grasp on what is to be done. This subtle approach to the possibility of moral struggle

and evil action is consistent with an outlook that starts from the broadly unified account of agency

I have been outlining. We can overturn dualistic interpretations of Kant’s philosophy without

having to deny that we often struggle to do what we recognize as right. In fact, it is only with this

unified account that we can safeguard this rich picture of moral life. If we isolate reason and

sensibility from one another and settle upon some variety of impositionism, there will be no good

explanation for the kind of uncertainty, confusion, indeterminacy and struggle that colours our

practical experience. Only the sensibly dependent rationalism I propose can adequately account

for our finitude, showing how our sensible dependency conditions the possibility of failure in

judgment without infringing upon reason’s autonomy. If, as on the dualistic view, reason’s activity

is taken to be wholly self-sufficient, and sensibility is set over and against it as the source of our

failure, its only explanation will be a crude conception of self-interest that fixes the struggle for

goodness in terms of a clear-eyed choice between good and evil. Since Kant is adamant that our

moral interest is irrevocable, and sensibility cannot determine reason against itself, we cannot take

this voluntarism to reflect his view.

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Finally, the account of moral motivation that I argue for also allows us to make sense of

another controversial aspect of Kant’s practical philosophy: namely, the practical postulates of

freedom, immortality, and God. Kant argues that belief in the reality of these three ideas of reason

is subjectively necessary, since only through this belief can the final end of pure practical reason,

the highest good, be grasped as possible. There is much at stake in this argument, for Kant holds

that if we lose sight of the highest good’s possibility, the influence of the moral law and thus our

motivation to pursue good ends will suffer (KU 5:452). Morally determined faith thus comprises

a necessary part of Kant’s practical philosophy, and to account for it, we must draw upon his

theory of motivation and the way in which certain beliefs can influence the moral disposition.

Here again, we find the interpretive terrain dominated by a divided conception of human nature.

Those who account for moral motivation by appealing to its affective psychological force interpret

the postulates as beliefs that encourage moral action by appeasing sensibility on its own

independent terms. For example, Guyer separates Kant’s account of motivation and the postulates

from his rationalist metaphysics, insisting that “the entire doctrine of the postulates of practical

reason is stated within the limits of human psychology.”18 Disconnected from our rational

capacities, belief in freedom, God, and immortality “have no recommendation except that they

are effective in motivating creatures like us to act in the way and toward the end that reason

demands.”19 Opposing this view are those who shy away from a psychological reading and think

Kant’s doctrine of the highest good and the practical postulates must be grounded in his

conception of practical reason. Taking up the same perspective as those who would argue for the

intellectualist conception of motivation, these commentators are concerned to distance

                                                                                                                         18 Guyer, p. 367. 19 Guyer, p. 367. For another account along these lines, see Lara Denis, “Autonomy and the Highest Good,” Kantian Review, vol. 10 (Jan. 2005), pp. 33-59.

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themselves from any reading which understands the postulates as additional incentives which are

designed to placate our sensibility and increase the chances of moral compliance. These

interpretations thus often take pains to show how morally grounded religious belief could be

rational independently of any hope for God-given happiness. For example, in an oft-cited

argument, Andrews Reath locates the concept of the highest good squarely in the domain of

reason, describing it as “a construct of reason” that introduces systematic unity into our various

ends by organizing them according to the dictates of morality.20 Grasping the possibility of this

systematic unity of ends is necessary for the subject because without it, moral conduct might

appear to be irrational: morality can seem to place contradictory demands upon us; acting well

might leave us vulnerable to exploitation by others; or our action may just prove ineffective in

bringing about the good.21 If moral conduct appears pointless in this way, the moral disposition

will be damaged. Belief in the postulates thus helps secure moral motivation insofar as it safeguards

the rationality of moral conduct.22

I claim we must reject both of these views and the two forms of dualism they represent.

Guyer falls on the affectivist side of the moral motivation debate, framing sensibility as an extra-

rational capacity and arguing that the possibility of moral motivation depends upon the conditions

of empirical psychology. Reath lands on the intellectualist side, giving no account of how

sensibility figures substantively in motivation and falsely depicting moral conduct as something

that needs to be defended against claims of irrationality. Neither view represents the unified vision

                                                                                                                         20 Andrews Reath, “Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant,” p. 597. 21 Reath, ibid., p. 618. 22 See Allen Wood’s Kant’s Moral Religion, for a different argument that defends the postulates on rational grounds. Wood claims that an agent implicitly commits herself to certain beliefs in willing her ends, beliefs which she cannot refuse on pain of irrationality. He then makes a case for the postulates being beliefs of this kind (p. 29-30).  

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Kant calls for in his letter to Herz, which can only be secured through a sensibly dependent

rationalism that takes our capacity to feel to be fully transformed by reason’s activity. The central

idea that morality is grounded in reason but must move us by relating directly to sensibility is

nowhere to be found. Guyer takes motivation to be secured on grounds that hold independently

of reason, while Reath, wary of embracing the dualism that Guyer so willingly attributes to Kant,

takes motivation to be wholly disconnected from the sensible, grounding it solely in the

recognition of rational authority and allowing any substantive role for sensibility to drop out of

the picture. So his position, too, ultimately bottoms out in a kind of dualism which sets sensibility

against reason and effectively erases the former’s part in accounting for moral motivation. Hence

we must conclude that neither the intellectualist nor the affectivist can give an adequate account

of how the practical postulates are supposed to motivate us.

If, alternatively, the unity of sensibly dependent reason can be secured in the way I

propose, we can draw on my claim about the necessary inseparability of rational standing and

sensible motivation to give a new reading of the postulates. I argue that the ideas of freedom,

God, and immortality safeguard our moral motivation by adding practically grounded cognitive

content to our representation of the highest good and its possibility. They do not, as Reath claims,

help secure the rationality of acting well—insofar as the moral law always already interests us,

good willing can never appear pointless. But the postulates can motivate on rational grounds by

solidifying our concept of the highest good and thereby bolstering the moral disposition, making

us less prone to quibble with the moral law and conjure up illusory conceptions of how to realize

its final end. In short, by helping to secure the right moral outlook, the postulates help to secure

moral motivation.

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Articulating the right relation between our spontaneous and receptive cognitive capacities

thus has far reaching consequences for Kant’s practical system. The unified conception of

mindedness that I call for fixes a certain general view of cognition which stretches across both

Kant’s theoretical and practical thought; a theory of motivation; an explanation of the possibility

of evil; and a particular understanding of the role of moral faith. At the heart of each of these

issues is the question of how our rational and sensible capacities relate. To address these questions

in the Kantian spirit, we must take up the hylomorphic reading I propose. This is the only way to

dissipate the air of paradox surrounding Kant’s project, which sets the affectivist and intellectualist

on opposing paths that both end by destroying the possibility of unity, placing an insurmountable

gap between reason and the senses.

3.

I develop this project over five chapters. The first four are constitutive of my positive

reading of Kant’s practical philosophy, while the fifth places this reading in relation to prominent

positions in the secondary literature. In the first chapter, I outline the structure of discursive

practical reason by relating it to the form of discursive reason as such. Taking seriously Kant’s

claim that “there can, in the end, be only one and the same reason, which must be distinguished

merely in its application” (G 4:391), I pursue the idea that finite reason has a general form which

admits of two determinate uses. Through an analysis of the different ways that cognition can relate

to its object, I determine first the concept of a finite, discursive faculty of reason, taking up as a

contrast case the concept of an infinite, intuitive faculty. The upshot of this analysis is an account

of our spontaneous and receptive capacities of mind which singles out Kant’s claim that they relate

to one another as form to matter. I then proceed to an analysis of discursive practical reason in

  21

particular, grounding the concept in this more general structure. Through this methodology, I lay

the foundations for both Kant’s cognitivism and his commitment to the hylomorphic structure

of sensibly dependent reason.

In the second chapter, I take up the relation between reason and sensibility more directly,

giving an analysis of how these two capacities relate with respect to practical reason. Continuing

to build on the claims established in the previous chapter, I argue that we should understand our

spontaneous and receptive capacities to relate in analogous ways across both uses of reason.

Taking up Kant’s analysis of the forms of space and time in the Critique of Pure Reason, I claim we

should think of the concept of respect for the moral law as playing a parallel role in the Critique of

Practical Reason. Other commentators give unsatisfactory accounts of the feeling of respect that

emphasize its affective aspect at the expense of its intellectual one, or vice versa. In contrast, I

argue that Kant’s hylomorphic commitments suggest we should understand respect as the form

of practical sensibility, the result of reason determining the sensible capacity for feeling so that its

deliverances can serve in acts of practical cognition.

In the third chapter, I address an important worry that threatens the broadly uniform

conception of reason under development. Unlike its theoretical counterpart, practical sensibility

can appear fundamentally resistant to the form of practical reason. Theoretical cognition cannot

even get off the ground if its sensible representations do not possess the unity bestowed by the

categories of nature. One of the principal achievements of the first Critique is Kant’s argument

that all sensible representations of objects must possess categorial form. But on the practical side,

Kant is adamant that we can have cognition from pure a priori grounds of reason and nevertheless

experience sensible desire that cuts against these grounds. As Kant insists in the introduction to

the second Critique, practical reason is dialectical in its empirical use: principles based in sensible

  22

desire strive to overthrow the moral law and make themselves the only valid determining grounds

of the will (KpV 5:16). This fact can make the idea of a systematically unified conception of finite

reason appear beyond our reach, as it suggests that respect for the moral law cannot be an a priori

necessary formal element of sensibility.

Against this worry, I continue to develop the argument that we should think of respect as

the form of practical sensibility, claiming that we can distinguish between respect as the actual

incentive or determining ground of the will, and respect as the formal element of our capacity to

feel which signifies the latter’s responsiveness to the demands of practical reason. This argument

fleshes out some of the promissory notes sketched above: though we often fail to act from respect

as the pure, moral incentive, our human action is respectful in character because it is sensitive to

the demands of practical reason. Even when we fail to act well, our reasoning and action is still

that of a moral being whose sensible desire is more or less efficacious based on its relation to

principles of reason. This is a fundamental requirement on the very possibility of practical

cognition and moral agency. Regardless of whether or not we fail in our efforts, it must be possible

for us to act from cognition of the good, and this is what respect secures as the rationally

determined formal element of sensibility. Thus although not every human action is motivated by

respect for the moral law as the pure formal incentive, our sensible nature is always already shaped

by practical reason. Having preserved the uniform, hylomorphic view I have been outlining, I go

on to develop the implications this position has for a detailed account of the possibility of evil.

In chapter four, I continue to discuss practical reason’s dialectical nature, turning to the

practical postulates of God, freedom, and immortality. I argue that the theory of moral motivation

emerging from the previous chapters allows us to interpret the postulates as ideas that motivate

good moral character by rendering our representations of the moral law and its final end, the

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highest good, more conceptually determinate. On this view, belief in the reality of the postulates

is required first and foremost because of limitations on theoretical, not practical, reason. Because

of these limitations, which Kant articulates in the Critique of Pure Reason, the subject cannot grasp

the theoretical possibility that virtue could be causally connected with happiness. This uncertainty

about the possibility of the highest good opens the door to doubt and despair that weakens moral

resolve. As I argue, the practical postulates help by adding conceptual determinacy to the content

of the highest good, showing how it can come about through grounds whose objectivity is

safeguarded by the moral law itself.

One can think of these first four chapters as relating in two different ways. As the above

summaries suggest, each addresses a different issue relating to Kant’s practical philosophy. While

chapter one grounds the cognitivist outlook that permeates the entire project, the subsequent

chapters offer mutually consistent accounts of the feeling of respect and moral motivation, the

possibility of evil, and the practical postulates. In addition, one can also understand each of these

chapters as specifying a new limit to the analogy I develop between practical and theoretical reason

as specific determinations of the concept of sensibly dependent reason. Chapter one begins with

the most obvious limit, which is brought out in Kant’s description of each use: while theoretical

cognition determines an already existing object, practical cognition brings the object it determines

into existence (KpV 5:46; Bix-x). In chapter two, I bring out the implications of this important

point. Since the object of theoretical cognition must be given, the act of cognition itself must

involve a synthesis of sensible matter to yield objective representations. Practical cognition,

however, requires no such sensible synthesis. As that species of cognition that produces its object,

practical cognition only relates to representations of objects insofar as these representations are

efficacious or motivating. This limit anticipates the way that sensibility functions in accordance

  24

with each use of reason. In the following two chapters my concern shifts to the dialectical use of

practical reason, and the analogical limits each one specifies reflects this. The third chapter takes

up Kant’s most basic determination of the two uses of reason in their dialectical use: while

theoretical reason is transcendent in its pure use, practical reason is transcendent in its empirical

use (KpV 5:16). The fourth chapter explores the implications of this inversion. Because sensibly

dependent practical reason is immanent in its pure use, it is licensed to assume the existence of

objects required for it to realize its necessary ends, even if such objects are ideal and thus

transcendent for the same faculty in its theoretical use. Suitably developed, these four limits

delineate a broadly unified and systematic account of theoretical and practical reason that only

diverges along principled lines required by fundamental differences in the way that practical and

theoretical cognition relate to their objects. The progression of this project thus safeguards the

systematic unity of Kant’s philosophy while defending a novel view of its practical part.

Finally, in chapter five, I turn to the secondary literature more directly, providing a more

detailed version of the structural analysis introduced above. I canvass a number of prominent

views from the field, organizing them in terms of whether they occupy an intellectualist or

affectivist version of the dualistic conception of reason and sensibility. Prominent affectivists

include Paul Guyer, Richard McCarty, Jeanine Grenberg, and Lara Denis; intellectualists include

Andrews Reath, Henry Allison, and Allen Wood. I trace these interpreters’ dualistic commitments

as they appear in relation to different interpretive issues, showing the various problems they give

rise to, and highlighting the way my own view can sidestep them.